[ecrea] ASLE-UKI 2012 Conference Update

Composting Culture: Literature, Nature, Popular Culture, Science
ASLE- UKI Biennial Conference, Wednesday 5th – Friday 7th September 2012

Full details of the conference programme and booking form are now 
available online at:

http://www.worcester.ac.uk/discover/conference-composting-culture-literature-nature-popular-culture-science.html

Keynote speakers include:

Thierry Bardini, Université de Montréal, author of Junkware, examining 
‘junk’ in nature (DNA) and culture (science fiction) alike.

Jed Rasula, Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor at the University of 
Georgia, author of This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry.

Molly Scott-Cato, University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, Green Party UK 
Speaker on Economics, author of Green Economics.
About the Conference:

This conference will be the 8th biennial conference of ASLE-UKI, the 
UK-Ireland branch of the Association for the Study of Literature and the 
Environment. It is hosted by the University of Worcester, and supported 
by the University's Institute of Humanities and Creative Arts.

Recent work in ecocriticism largely recognises the complexity of 
ecological science and philosophy and its social and political 
dimensions. This has resulted in an increased emphasis on paradigms and 
perspectives that embrace that complexity: posthumanism; biosemiotics; 
discordance; consilience etc. Consequently, with regard to its objects 
of study, ecocriticism might increasingly be characterised as a 
multidisciplinary act of ecological intervention that has fermented an 
array of possible reference points – globalisation, science, 
neuroscience, spirituality etc – into an expanding range of cultural 
texts, stretching far beyond the literary canon of romantic nature 
writing that shaped ecocriticism in its early years.

This conference will explore the extent to which correspondences between 
more complex ecological understanding and cultural forms might be 
evident, most particularly, in non-canonical texts, or previously 
unexplored linkages between theories and texts, or in the upcycling of 
established literary or cultural forms, movements, writers etc. 
Conceptualised by Jed Rasula as a process of composting where 
‘interanimating tendencies’ converge into the possible emergence ‘of 
newness, of the unpredicted’, this ‘nutritive sensibility’ has recently 
traversed cultural theory and practice: in Harriet Tarlo’s 
identification of a conjunction between experimental poetics and radical 
landscape poetry; in the ‘new nature writing’ of ‘Edgelands’ (Paul 
Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts), or places like Essex, which 
acknowledges the blurring of human-nonhuman, rural and urban; even in 
popular culture, for example in a recognition of technology’s perhaps 
paradoxical ability to inculcate both deep ecological awareness and a 
scientific sense of nature as process (as aspired to in Bjork’s recent 
Biophilia project).

There will be, at the conference, approximately 80 papers, on a 
diversity of topics. These will include papers or sessions on: animals, 
biosemiotics, capitalism, carbon, composting, dirt, ecopoetry, gardens, 
land and landscape, posthumanism, recycling, ruins, translation, science 
fiction, waste, and the future of ecocriticism.
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